Brief Encounter

Normally, I make it a rule never to go to basketball movies (especially if they star basketball players) or those whose titles are in ebonics. But Spike Lee is a talented director about whose work it is still possible to be hopeful, in spite of a string of disappointments. He Got Game turns out to…

Holy Smoke by Jane Campion is a movie whose most basic assumptions—arising out of a weirdly anachronistic, 1970s-vintage view of bourgeois life—makes it rather difficult to like. From the first glimpse she gives us of “Sans Souci, Sydney,” an overhead shot of acres of tiled-roof bungalows that bespeaks “suburbia,” we know that Miss Campion’s sympathies…

An inspiring account of a coach’s dedication and a high school football team’s success which rather underplays its chief insight into the importance of character

Nerds continue their reign as Hollywood’s favorite heroes, though in real life they are rarely so clever as we want to believe they are

Men in Black, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld from the comic book by Lowell Cunningham, is offered as a justification for weird sort of benign paranoia. The government, we are asked to believe, really knows all about the alien presence in our midst (that much is familiar) but they are keeping the knowledge of it from…

Every cliché of the post-1960s prison movie is taken out and put through its paces, but don’t worry: it’s all in fun